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Although the movement originated in the cloister, the court followed in its wake, and William of Malmesbury had his secular counterpart in Alfred of Beverley. King John, with scarcely a quality which men cared to praise, was, strangely enough, fond of books and of scholars. A taste for learning was gradually leavening the barbarous Normanic lump, spreading downwards from monarch to people.
"Time was," said the monk of Malmesbury, "when fifteen earls and more followed the king to war; but now only five or six gave him their assistance." The five earldoms of Thomas of Lancaster meant the extinction of as many ancient houses. The earldoms of Chester, Cornwall, and Norfolk had long been in the king's hands.
The triumph of the Angevin conqueror was now complete. The baronage lay crushed at his feet. The Church was silent. The royal authority had been pushed, at least in name, to the utmost limits of the island. The close of this first work of settlement was marked by a royal progress between September 1157 and January 1158 through the whole length of England from Malmesbury to Carlisle.
"The multitude of waggons," wrote the monk of Malmesbury, "if they had been extended in a single line would have occupied the space of twenty leagues." The splendour and number of the army inspired the king and his friends with the utmost confidence.
While Malmesbury was negotiating indeed France was roused to new dreams of conquest by the victories of Napoleon Buonaparte. The genius of Carnot, the French Minister of War, had planned a joint advance upon Vienna by the French armies of Italy and the Rhine, the one under Buonaparte, the other under Moreau. The plan was only partly successful.
This exceptional severity springs from a primitive and natural conception of the State a conception most logically expressed by Hobbes of Malmesbury under the similitude of a "mortal God" or Leviathan, the almost omnipotent and unlimited source of authority.
Thorold, the new Norman Abbot of Malmesbury, kept a body of archers in his pay, and whenever his monks resisted any of his improper measures, he used to call out, "Here, my men-at-arms!" At length the Conqueror heard of his proceedings. "I'll find him his match!" cried William. "I will send him to Peterborough, 'where Hereward will give him as much fighting as he likes."
A replica of this manuscript, which belonged to the monks of Malmesbury, is now at Cambridge. Their names are written in alternate lines of bold and silver, the binding being also originally of gold and silver, to which fact a Latin couplet in verse testifies. As time went on it was carelessly kept by the monks of Durham, but entries were made up to the eve of the dissolution of the monastery.
Then he offered his heart and hand to a lady called Bethmann, a banker’s daughter whom he had known at Frankfurt, and found very much to his liking. This young person, in the words of Lord Malmesbury, was “all sentiment and all fire”; but she had principles and discretion. She had misgivings about the character of the marriage and the constancy of the bridegroom.
William of Malmesbury says that he began the church from its foundations and finished it. In the face of this positive testimony it is probable that Thomas built not only the nave but the choir. That he did so has been doubted, because the choir of his day was undoubtedly a very small one, and was afterwards demolished by Roger.
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